Princess Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Allan Poe, and Psychobiography

Abstract

Princess Marie Bonaparte was a colorful yet mysterious member of Freud's inner circle of psychoanalysis. In analysis with Freud beginning in 1925 (she was then 45 years old), she became a lay analyst and writer of many papers and books. Her most ambitious task was a 700-page psychobiography of Edgar Allan Poe that was first published in French in 1933. She was fascinated by Poe's gothic stories--with the return to life of dead persons and the eerie, unexpected turns of events. Her fascination with Poe can be traced to the similarity of their early traumatic life experiences. Bonaparte had lost her mother a month after her birth. Poe's father deserted the family when Edgar was two years old, and his mother died of tuberculosis when he was three. Poe's stories helped him to accommodate to these early traumatic losses. Bonaparte vicariously shared in Poe's loss and the fantasies of the return of the deceased parent in his stories. She was sensitive and empathetic to Poe's inner world because her inner world was similar. The result of this psychological fit between Poe and Bonaparte was her psychobiography, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. It was a milestone in psychobiography but limited in its psychological scope by its strong emphasis on early childhood trauma. Nevertheless it proved Bonaparte a bona fide creative psychoanalyst and not a dilettante propped up by her friendship with Freud.